"Well, is she your sister?" asked the boy.
"No, she is not my sister," Nekhludoff answered with surprise. "And with whom are you?"
"I am with mamma. She is a political," said the boy.
"Maria Pavlovna, take away Kolia!" said the inspector, evidently finding Nekhludoff's conversation with the boy contrary to the law.
Maria Pavlovna, the same beautiful woman who had attracted Nekhludoff's attention, rose and with heavy, long strides approached him.
"What is he asking you? Who you are?" she asked, slightly smiling with her beautifully curved lips, and confidingly looking at him with her prominent, kindly eyes, as though expecting Nekhludoff to know that her relations to everybody always have been, are and ought to be simple, affable, and brotherly. "He must know everything," she said, and smiled into the face of the boy with such a kindly, charming smile that both the boy and Nekhludoff involuntarily also smiled.
"Yes, he asked me whom I came to see."
"Maria Pavlovna, you know that it is not permitted to speak to strangers," said the inspector.
"All right," she said, and, taking the little hand of the boy into her own white hand, she returned to the consumptive's mother.
"Whose boy is that?" Nekhludoff asked the inspector.